Traditional network appliances are hardware computing devices that are configured to perform a specific task or tasks on data packets that they receive. These network devices may be configured to intercept messages sent between two computing devices, and to operate on those messages before sending them on. Examples of such network appliances include a firewall, a wide area network (WAN) optimizer, and so forth.
A single network may use multiple network appliances. To enable such operation of multiple network appliances, these network appliances are traditionally arranged in a chain, in which a first network appliance is configured to send messages to a second network appliance after operating on the messages, the second network appliance is configured to send the messages to a third network appliance after operating on the messages and so on. To modify such a chain of network appliances, an administrator traditionally manually reconfigures one or more of the network appliances in the chain.